All wireless companies arse-rape their customers, but only in North America do they do it without even giving us a drop of Astroglide.

When P. set my phone plan up for me, he knew exactly how I’d use an iPhone. He put limited minutes, unlimited data, and and a reasonable SMS plan on, knowing that I’d rarely call with it, but would absolutely use its Internet capabilities whether I was within Wifi range or not, and that I’d want to text a few family members and friends without having to keep a running tab of the cost in my head.  In fact, the second thing I did with the phone after poking about to see what was what, and answering one call from him (he called me from the kitchen) was…send SMS to people in Canada and in Sweden because I was excited about having an iPhone. I think I had a 250 texts per month plan, which, considering I use IM and email a lot as well, should have been adequate, and he said that if I found it wasn’t enough, we’d upgrade to whatever I actually needed.

After I finally set up the online account a few weeks later, I logged in to poke around. I looked at my minutes usage and thought, “Yeah, an ordinary mobile wouldn’t have been much use to me,” because I’d used less than fifteen minutes of my “anytime minutes”. Meh…at least you get to keep rollover minutes for 12 months. I checked data usage, and although I have unlimited, I probably don’t need it; I think he got it because it was included in the most appropriate of AT&T’s iPhone plans. Still, nice to not worry about every advert or image downloading on a web page. Then, I looked at my SMS. I had a little green bar showing (some number) used of 250. Okay, fine. Below that, though, there was a red bar showing (some number) of pay-per-use texts. I thought, “Hang on…I’m not texing for stupid ringtone stuff, or voting for my favourite American Idol contestant, or receiving any ‘text dirty to me’ services, so WTF are ‘pay-per-use’ texts doing on my account?” I called AT&T, navigated through their automated menu (which, to be fair, isn’t bad at all, unlike fucking Charter’s), and got a human being. I asked what was going on, and she told me that the text plan I had covered only texting within the US, and that outside the US, I was being billed $0.25 per message. I didn’t get pissed off at her because it wasn’t her fault, but I’d looked on their web site the day after Christmas and found absolutely no reference to the fact that it was US-only. I read pretty much everything I could find there that referred to SMS plans, and didn’t see that there even existed an “international plan”. I told the rep that a domestic plan was of absolutely no use to me because there’s no one in the US to whom I’d send more than half a dozen texts, and even then, only very seldom, so it would make more sense to pay per message for that. No point in paying even $5.00/month for what might amount to $1.00 worth of messages, or perhaps none at all. I told her to take off the domestic texting and give me international; 100 messages per month for $9.99. Still too expensive (texting costs the company nearly nothing), but better than $25.00 per month for 100 per-use international messages.

I asked her twice whether that meant if I sent a message or received one, it would just apply to my limit, and I would not be charged extra unless I went over the 100 messages. She assured me that was the case, and although I did think they were gouging bastards, that’s because I think they’re all gouging bastards; I believe Canada is the only other country in the civilised world that makes you pay for receiving messages (which is something out of your control, and yes, if it’s spam, you still pay), and they do that because the US gets away with it, so customers don’t know any better. I thanked her for her help and thought I was good to go. I text people in Canada and in Sweden, and nowhere else, and 100 should have been at least “enough”, if not exactly freedom to text any time I wanted.

The next time I logged into my account, I noticed that there were 5 SMS on the red pay-per-use bar. I thought, “Oh, those must be ‘leftovers’ from the time before I switched to the international plan.” I didn’t worry about it; thinking we’d just suck it up, pay for the ones I’d used when I had only a domestic plan, and be done with it. Then, the day my voice mail started to get “jealous” and would let me have only about 1/3 of my incoming calls–the rest went to voice mail on the first ring and I’d never hear a thing–I logged in to get the customer service number. Just to make sure, I looked at my data usage. Goddamn…now I have more pay-per-use messages! When I talked to the rep about my voice mail, I asked her about the text message. I told her what had happened, and she asked me whether I’d texted anyone anywhere in the US (I hadn’t). She went to check, then came back and told me those were just more “leftovers” from the pre-international plan days. That didn’t sound quite right to me–I switched to international in January–but I figured an AT&T rep would know more about their billing cycles than I would, so I let it go. Still, I was a bit suspicious, so I logged in the next day. This time, I saw 16 messages, and although I wasn’t sure, I thought I’d had only 14 the day before. Hmmm…

I sent a couple of texts to B. last night. I’m sure he was greatly amused, since they were half in drunken (bad) Swedish and half in English, but they very definitely were sent to a number in Sweden. I logged into my account this morning to check; lo and behold, I now had 18 pay-per-use messages. I thought, “What the fuck are they doing?!? What part of ‘Sweden is not in the US’ did these dumbasses miss?” I thought it must be some kind of mistake, so I called customer support and told my story to the lovely young lady. She asked whether I’d hold for her to check, and I thought it was probably just some little mistake and we’d have it all cleared up in a few minutes. Not quite. She returned to tell me that the international plan applied only to outgoing messages–those I’d send outside the US–but messages sent to me were considered “domestic”, regardless of their country of origin. At that point, I got pissed. I know that wireless companies are professionals at finding ways to milk additional nickels and dimes out of their customers over and above their advertised rates, and that’s why I’d asked twice about the texting plan. Twice, she told me it worked just like the domestic plan–incoming and outgoing both get deducted from the total message count–but that was apparently not the case. I usually don’t get upset with front-line reps because they’re just drones, but I did lose it a little. I said, “So you are telling me that every time my brother feels like saying, “Hey, whatcha doin’?”, you are billing me one quarter of a dollar? She said that was so, and I replied, “Well, what possible use could your international plan be to anyone, then? Who the hell sends SMS and never receives any?!” I’m sure she was thinking I’d lost my mind, but she calmly said, “I would recommend you put a $5 domestic plan on your account. That way, incoming messages would be covered by that.” I said, “Oh, you would recommend that, would you? Why, exactly, are you the only one there who seems to know I needed to do that? I’ve talked to two of your reps, asking very specifically how the international SMS plan works, and although both of them put me on hold to check, they still didn’t know. Are you hiding that information–is it classified or something?” I know it wasn’t right to go off on her over a few dollars’ worth of SMS, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I’d been billed for something after asking twice to make sure I understood exactly what I was getting for my $9.99 a month.

I was pretty pissed, and since P. was within earshot, I told him what the rep had just told me. I said I wasn’t sure whether I should just pay the extra $5 a month for a 250 message domestic plan, or whether I should just say to hell with the works and cut everything down to the lowest possible number of minutes and no data or SMS plans at all. P said to just get the domestic plan, but as he was saying that, the rep said, “Okay…since you were misinformed, I’ll put a $15 credit on your account, and that will cover the messages you were charged for.” (Grammatically incorrect, but that’s what she said.) I thanked her, and although I’m still resentful about having to pay for incoming messages, since I have so little control about who texts me, I told her to go ahead and put on a domestic plan to cover the messages I’m sending…to Canada and Sweden…or the ones coming to me from Canada and Sweden. I still don’t know for sure which isn’t covered by the plan. I’d imagine I pissed her off because it was such a small amount of money to complain about, but I don’t care; they pissed me off by creating an utterly useless SMS plan and not educating the very people to whom customer inquiries are directed. Besides, any few cents I can get out of the fuckers who price-fix, gouge us for barely adequate service and nickel-and-dime us for shit that should be free with the account…well, so much the better for me. I’ll put the $15 toward my next bottle of Absolut and keep those drunk-texts going! 😛